From: Karin Wikoff <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2015 10:11:41 +0000

If any of us had the vision, we'd be out there doing it. (Or as I say
about politics -- if I had all the answers, I'd be obliged to run for
President....)

In this case, you have to convince the right people to agree with you
before you can actually get them to sit down at a table to talk and
see where it might go.  So, you start from where you are, and that's
with talking about it.

Karin

Karin Wikoff
Electronic and Technical Services Librarian
Ithaca College Library
Ithaca, NY 14850
Email: [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 07:03:24 +0000

The trouble with these musings (apart from the usual ‘I’m a perfectly
reasonable person; you’re a raving partisan’ attacks) is that they are
rather empty.  They don’t actually give a vision of what the world of
scholarly communications would look like if we entered the nirvana of
blissful cooperation.  Rather disappointing.

David



On 20 Jul 2015, at 00:51, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: T Scott Plutchak <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2015 22:20:13 +0000

I think Karin is very much on the right track.  My own musings on the
subject are here:

http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2015/07/what-we-share.html

Scott

T Scott Plutchak | Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies UAB |
The University of Alabama at Birmingham The Edge of Chaos ­ LHL 427
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4712-5233



>From: Karin Wikoff <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:09:23 +0000
>
>I think the relationship is symbiotic.  It doesn't have to be as
>antagonistic as it sometimes is.  The common shared goal is a desire to
>sustain academic publishing.  Each party gets something different out
>of academic publishing, but if it becomes so unsustainable that it
>crashes and burns, every party loses out.  So, we have a shared
>interest in making things work.  The trick is that we each do have to
>protect our interests, which can lead to taking actions which
>exacerbate the conflict and do not help the larger goal of keeping it
>sustainable.  (Or perhaps making it sustainable, because I am not at
>all sure that it really is right now).  Sticking to an insistence on
>continuing to maintain a much-larger-than-any-other-publishers profit
>margin in the face of disruptive change, for example, -- that's not
>sustainable.  (Kevin Smith had a blog about this a couple years ago,
>with a link to a financial analysis on the impact of open access on
>Elsevier if they continue on the same path).  On the other hand,
>libraries can't just expect publishers to change everything around to
>meet our needs to the total detriment of their profit margin either -
>and yet, we are squeezed in ways beyond our control.  We are not a
>bottomless well.
>
>I would love to see publishers, vendors, authors, and librarians sit
>down and talk straight about what can be done to reach that shared goal
>because right now, it feels like we are on the edge of a freefall where
>academic publishing is increasingly not sustainable, and all the
>parties are just more entrenched than ever.  It's very, very hard to
>get people to set that stuff aside and work together towards making it
>all work.  I don't know if it can be done, but we are not getting there
>the way we've been operating up to now -- in a competitive, antagonist
>way.  (I also think such a step would be harder for publishers and
>vendors than for librarians, but that could just be my prejudice).
>
>It still costs -- money, time, effort -- to create and distribute
>quality academic content.  Open access, regardless the model, just
>shifts those costs.  The question still hangs there -- how can we make
>it pay for itself in a sustainable way so libraries can continue to
>purchase, so publishers can continue to be profitable enough to exist,
>so authors can be compensated for the intellectual work, and so that
>patrons can have access to the important academic information they
>need?
>
>My opinion,
>
>Karin
>--
>Karin Wikoff
>Electronic and Technical Services Librarian Ithaca College Library
>Ithaca, NY 14850
>Email: [log in to unmask]